Quotes from Ben Shahn

Whatever one has rejected is in itself a tangible shaping force.

I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

Whatever I get involved in, I'm totally involved, you see.

I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York.

I remember traveling around in Arkansas with Senator Robinson, and I told him what this little trick was. He felt very much part of it and had me take pictures of people unbeknownst to them.

When a man returned from the field and we'd look at the work, we'd criticize each other very genuinely and never offensively. And we would avoid all tricks, angle shots were just horrible to us.

So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.

I confess that Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.

I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so on.

All art is based on non-conformity.

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.